Perched along the coast of the English Channel, Dorset offers visitors the perfect combination of a whimsical countryside and winsome coastline. With enchanting castles and ancient, fossil-rich beaches, Visit Dorset should have no trouble at all drawing visitors to explore and stay a while.

There was just one problem, and it wasn’t the destination: it was their technology. Like most DMOs, Visit Dorset regularly promoted events and attractions with a robust email marketing program. What they needed was a solution that would enable them to highlight upcoming experiences to their visitor database, promote Dorset’s local businesses, and make sure that their database and mailing lists were kept current on an ongoing basis.

In May 2018, Visit Dorset decided to switch to Simpleview's dedicated email marketing solution. Since this solution is fully integrated within Simpleview's DMS (Destination Management System), it enabled Visit Dorset to pull together the DMO website, product database and CRM into one seamless solution, offering extensive email marketing capability. Once in place, they were able to double down on their email marketing game, strategically increasing their cadence. Now, whether it’s for an ad hoc send or an ongoing campaign, their team is able to create and send email newsletters in as little as five minutes.

By interacting more frequently with visitors, the DMO-visitor relationship has been significantly improved. Visitors receive greater value from their subscription to Visit Dorset, and Visit Dorset has a more engaged audience. As such, Visit Dorset’s mailing list, with just over 25,000 subscribers, continues to rise. Most critically, they’ve been able to improve their unsubscribe rate, dropping it from 0.87 to 0.52 percent.

All of this presents a huge financial win for Visit Dorset. Not only is the software cheaper than the previous solution, but the increased number of emails also enables Visit Dorset to sell more opportunities to businesses who wish to advertise.